Gaming: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl

Shortly after another disaster in Chernobyl, the authorities surround the area with the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Guard, and they begin to hear weird screams and rumblings coming from within. After a while though, most of them are returned to earlier posts. Curiosity gets the better of some people, so they sneak into the 30-kilometer area to do some good old-fashioned investigating. These people are called Stalkers, and they report back to the authorities with their findings.

The 3D engine shines in a few key areas, all crucial in shaping the game's atmosphere. It's got a huge draw distance, which leads to the palpable feeling that this is a big world. Lighting and shadowing are its other big strengths. For this benchmark we have the in-game settings at maximum (AA/AF enabled), Dynamic lighting was enabled.

Image Quality setting:

In-game Software Anti Aliasing enabled

16x anisotropic filtering

Dynamic lighting enabled

We went for the games maximum quality settings, recently we also enabled dynamic lighting (as requested recently in our forums). S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does not support hardware anti-aliasing, yet uses a software applied method which is enabled.

Gaming: War Front - Turning Point

For those who just cannot get enough of the Second World War, War Front: Turning Point offers enough spin on the traditional model to offer a very satisfying experience. Graphically, the game is great, and is configured to run on a myriad of systems with different specs. Higher-end PCs will be treated to a nice amount of eye candy, including detailed vehicles, great environments and excellent special and explosion effects.

Image Quality setting:

4x Anti Aliasing

16x anisotropic filtering

A game that has not been tweaked to death at driver level as it is very uncommon to benchmark; which is really why we include it. We enabled all possible in-game eye-candy and with 4xAA and 16xAF at 2560x1600; we can still play at ~52 FPS. The performance here is really good and very close to the GTS 512MB again.

KFA2 Galaxy GTX 550 Ti LTD OC WHITE reviewIn this review we'll have a peek at the warmongers from KFA2 (Galaxy), they unleash this cute little beastly looking GTX 550 Ti LTD OC White edition graphics card. And to make it even more special, they slapped all components on a sexy white PCB again. Armed with that atypical looking cooler you'll learn that this product makes no compromises, you will not hear it, it will not run hot and it even comes factory clocked at a full GHz, quite amazing as GPUs seem to slowly pass that weird 1 GHz threshold.

Galaxy GeForce 9800 GT 1024MB review | testWe test a product from the guys at Galaxy, and that means customization and extra features, all for a fair price. Custom PCB, custom cooling, custom bracket, HDMI output, black DVI+backplate heck it even packs 1024MB of memory to play around with for roughly the same money as a 512MB model. All fairly impressive really.

Galaxy Geforce 8800 GT HDMI w/ Xtreme TunerOur initial review of this product was taken offline as we received an early version of the product. This early version had a "beta" cooler on it that made a truck-load of noise. Galaxy claimed to have a new cooler ready and asked if if we could revise the review based on the new and final cooler. And therefore we have updated this initial article to revision 2; based on new facts with the final cooling solution implemented. And it sure is a lot better.